I Love Dropbox

I’ve been using Dropbox for quite some time now and surprising, there are still a good many people who aren’t familiar with this service. In a nutshell, it’s a service that allows you to keep a folder in sync in various locations, so you’ll be able to access your files stored within anywhere you are (iPhone, other people’s computers, your other computer etc).

While I’ve been using several online storage services before this, one of the main benefits of Dropbox is that the sync is invisible to me. I just drop the files into the folder and Dropbox automatically keeps it synced with the server, using a tiny symbol to indicate if the file is synced or not. While I really wouldn’t suggest you use it to do backups, I must say that it’s a very useful tool to keep your files backed up in the cloud. One more thing, there’s also built-in versioning, so if you delete or screw up a file on your computer, you’ll be able to pull up a previously saved version of it from Dropbox (again: don’t rely on it for backup, though).

I discovered Dropbox when I was figuring out a way to keep my quotations folder in sync between two computers that were many miles apart and had different users. I must say, it worked out better than I could have imagined. In a nutshell, it’s a great collaboration tool.

Of course, not everything is peachy keen, especially since it’s a free service. Since the company changed their terms of service slightly recently, privacy buffs have been up in arms over the new terms, but to me, considering that I’m using it for free, I don’t really have anything to complain, since I believe if someone isn’t happy with it, they might as well just setup a rival service with terms that they can accept.

Would I recommend it? By now you’d probably guess that I urge you to sign up, and since Dropbox encourages referrals, if you sign up using the links on this page, you’ll get an additional 250GB storage free (so we both win, yay). Dropbox offers 2GB of free storage from the get go, though you can get several extra gigabytes of space by referring folks and sharing Dropbox via social networks. Of course, if you’re rich, Dropbox also offers 50GB and 100GB of storage for $99 and $199 per year respectively.